Enlightenment Now

Enlightenment Now

The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker

Useful Lies

Self-deception as strategy: the best liars believe themselves.

What’s going on is that these people are sharing blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers). While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.
Entropy Tax

Import order constantly or dissolve into disorder.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not interacting with its environment), entropy never decreases. ... Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.